The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (MCA) will present
Amor Como Primer Idioma (Love as First Language), an exhibition
by Tijuana native Marcos Ramirez (a.k.a. ERRE), at MCA Downtown
February 13 through July 18, 1999. ERRE's critically acclaimed
installations for inSITE94 and inSITE 97, the binational exhibitions
staged in San Diego and Tijuana, have made him one of the preeminent
artists in the Baja California region.

Amor Como Primer Idioma reflects the ongoing struggle
over language and national identity that has been especially heated
in California. The 1998 passage of Proposition 227 (requiring
all students in public schools be immersed in English-only instruction,
dismantling to a great extent bilingual education) influenced
this multi-layered installation. For ERRE, the piece is a useful
meditation on the potential of love's symbols as challenges to
divisive social and cultural barriers, as constituted in and through
language. The exhibition features four new pieces by the artist.

Acorazado, the title of ERRE's outdoor sculpture, is
a pun on the Spanish words coraza (armour-plate) and corazón
(heart). A symbol brimming with multiple meanings, the heart appears
throughout the history of visual culture in the Americas, notably
in pre-Columbian rites, Catholic pageantry, and Baroque art. ERRE
conceives of his armored heart as an abandoned structure (perhaps
watchtower, fort, or isolation tank). Within the fourteen-foot-high
sculpture rests a lone chair that one can view only by peering
through slats cut into the object. While this outdoor heart is
ominous and seemingly impenetrable, a heart placed inside the
Museum, made of open, wrought iron bars, reclines in a position
of vulnerability. With these two hearts ERRE loosely suggests
cultural associations, connecting traditional representations
of hard-heartedness and distance to the outdoor organ while the
interior heart is more passionate, therefore caged and suffering.

Dual statements set the tone for the installation: "Lengua
para expresarnos (Language/Tongue to express ourselves)"
and "Corazón para comprendernos (Heart to understand
ourselves)." In one sculpture, these phrases are placed
in a rectangular structure that streams forth a fluid resembling
tears, sweat, or other bodily fluids. The title of another piece,
Ruins of Babel, alludes to the biblical tale, and is composed
of letters from different languages: Chinese, Arabic, Latin, and
others. The piece imagines a time before the indoctrination of
language, a time when the differences in languages were unrecognizable.